In October 1793, Marie Antoinette, the downfallen Queen of France, was beheaded amid the violent aftermath of the French Revolution. By that time, Irish statesman and orator Edmund Burke (1729-1797) had become an outspoken
critic of the Revolutionaries' ongoing reign of terror. Persons of Royal ancestry in France were subject to arbitrary imprisonment and execution, along with anyone accused of aiding or sympathizing with them. In this speech, Burke laments the death of the Queen and the passing of an era.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France,
then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb,
which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just
above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had
just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and
splendor and joy.

Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have,
to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did
I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic,
distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the
sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream
that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation
of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought
ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even
a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists,
and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished
forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank
and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination
of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of
an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations,
the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone,
that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain
like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which
ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its
evil, by losing all its grossness.